


Song out of a Seashell

by aban_asaara



Series: Amabel Hawke [13]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Porn with Feelings, Romance, Smut, Wedding Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-28 01:40:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18201767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: “Andraste can keep her husband,” Hawke says, sliding a fingertip down the taper of his ear. “Mine’s better.”





	Song out of a Seashell

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks (and apologies for the delay!) to [everidite](https://everidite.tumblr.com/), who sent me the prompt that spurred this entire thing: “‘I love you’ said with a raised eyebrow and a grin”, which has turned into an unapologetically sappy excuse to put my Rivaini wedding headcanons to use, and to [theherocomplex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theherocomplex) and [hollyand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollyand/) for their invaluable help with this piece. ♥
> 
> This takes place after the events of The Far Shore, my upcoming fic set in Rivain, a few months before DAI. I don’t believe it spoils anything, beyond the fact that Fenris and Hawke live to settle down in Rivain and get married, but anyone who knows me knew that already. :D

I have named you queen.  
There are taller than you, taller.  
There are purer than you, purer.  
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.

But you are the queen.

When you go through the streets  
no one recognizes you.  
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks  
at the carpet of red gold  
that you tread as you pass,  
the nonexistent carpet.

And when you appear  
all the rivers sound  
in my body, bells  
shake the sky,  
and a hymn fills the world.

Only you and I,  
only you and I, my love,  
listen to it.

— _The Queen_ , by Pablo Neruda

 

Wealth, much like food, is meant to be shared in Rivain: though men and women alike flaunt their status by attiring themselves in all manner of adornments (sometimes quite literally _wearing_ their wealth by sewing coins to the hems of their robes), this conspicuous display also means responsibility. The more one owns, the more one owes to their kith and kin.

Thus wealth constantly flows from hands to hands within the borders of a village, and sometimes, in the case of disasters such as crop failure, for instance, even from one community to another. Brides also rarely bring dowries to their husbands, apart from the talents and skills that will support their household and village; indeed, a most queer tradition exists in northern Rivain, in which the bride appears in nothing but a shift, and then attempts to put on all of her bridal gifts (traditionally jewelry and garments) as the night wears on. Much merriment is had by watching the bride dance in her gaudy encumbrance, and at the end of the festivities, the bridegroom follows the inevitable trail of silk and beads to their new home.

—From _In Pursuit of Knowledge: The Travels of A Chantry Scholar_ , by Brother Genitivi.

 

“Maker, I’m so full,” Hawke groans, and Fenris turns to see her flop back on their bed. “We certainly haven’t wasted time, have we?” she continues, lifting her head off the mattress to grin up at him while patting her belly. “Only just got married and we already have a food baby on the way. Good thing this isn’t Hightown.”

Fenris laughs, loosening the embroidered collar of his tunic. “It would take much more than marriage to make an honest woman out of you.” He stretches himself down on the bed next to her, head propped on the palm of his hand.

“Starting small, serah. I’m certain Sebastian at least will be delighted to hear I’ve taken fornication off my list of sins,” she retorts, then laughs when one of the bead strings festooning her brow slips down her face to rest on the bridge of her nose.

He tucks it back behind her ear, the gesture so natural he marvels at the ease of it. “Just don’t take too many off your list.”

He presses his mouth to hers into a slow, indolent kiss, like a cat stretching itself out in a patch of sun. Her arms slide around his shoulders in a loose hold, and she smiles up at him as he brushes her cheek with his thumb. Flakes of kohl dust her cheekbones under tired eyes; it was a long night, dawn edging pink on the horizon already, but she looks— _happy_ , happier than he recalls seeing her since Kirkwall.

Hawke steals another kiss off his lips. “How dead do you think we are when Varric finds out we eloped?”

“Very much so,” he answers with a chuckle. “Although I believe our marriage is not technically complete till we’ve consummated it.”

She rolls her eyes in mock exasperation. “Oh, _great_ , so we’re either looking at a sexless future or our untimely death at Bianca’s business end.”

“After all we’ve eaten tonight? More likely we will die in the throes of indigestion.”

“Or that,” she concedes, the corners of her mouth curled up, her knuckles moving across the front of his tunic in slow, absentminded patterns. “It’s just like us, isn’t it? To _not_ make love on our wedding night.”

Fenris laughs under his breath. “We will more than make up for it once all that food has gone down, I have no doubt.”

There was no end to the dishes set in front of them all night: cubes of lamb and waterfowl cooked in colorful sauces, plates of roasted peppers and eggplants frilled with green coriander, skewers of spicy chicken and towers of pillowy flat breads. Fenris nibbled on the fish pastilla and let Hawke have the shrimp in the saffron rice, but everything else was delicious, spices and flavors melting on the tongue in intricate combinations. Danarius himself never ate this well, Fenris is certain.

It startles him, how long he’s gone without thinking the dead man’s name; even more so how easy it is to banish it with another kiss, Hawkeʼs lips still sweet with the honey from the pastries she kept eating even while complaining about being too full. Warmth stirs lazily in the pit of his stomach at the taste: it makes him as weak now as it did during the feast, when he licked her fingertips clean and kissed the crumbs of ground pistachio off her lips and chin. Heat blossomed across her cheeks while the guests clapped and whistled—even as quite a few of them would have gladly married her right out of his arms, Fenris suspects. Even old Salim shed three decades when he forwent his walking stick to make the bride twirl on herself, and they laughed and swapped fragments of Common and Rivaini while the beads and coins fringing the sash around her waist clinked with her steps. But even as she danced with younger, more handsome men than Fenris, always her eyes would look for him, and the smile on her face would outshine even the gold piled up on her head whenever they found him.

He would have been content to watch her all night, but he too had to dance, to Hawke’s utter delight, his partners flirting with him while he tried not to step on their sandaled feet. Ayika, bolder than any nineteen-year-old had any right to be, even refused to release him afterward, and a good-natured boasting contest settled the question of his next dance partner (Hawke humored the girl, but _I defeated the Arishok in single combat_ granted her the uncontested victory.)

Isabela’s stories, colorful though they are, do not do the Rivaini justice.

Strange, how the villagers accepted them, without question or condition. From the start they were treated not as strangers but as friends returned from a long voyage. Not that it wasn’t without its hurdles, without even a tongue in common: Fenris grasped the patterns of the dialect more readily than Hawke did, the number of words borrowed from Qunlat making up somewhat for its fluid nature, but her very disposition has granted her a fluency he still cannot match with words. His attempts to get across the fact that they were not married, for instance, kept drawing either laughter or confusion.

“It appears the Rivaini consider a couple living together married by definition,” he finally told Hawke as they lay together in a hammock, swaying in the shade of two palm trees. “Hence why everyone seems resolved to call us husband and wife.”

Hawke grinned, holding up a conch shell to the light to better admire the striations of its translucent whorl. “There _is_ one obvious solution,” she replied, then brought the shell to his ear, the roar of the ocean twinning itself to her words. “Let’s get married.”

Not ones to turn down a feast, the Rivaini, and so they were to be married two moons thence. No legal standing to their union, of course, acknowledged in thickly accented Common by the elder Seers of the village, not without record of it in the archives of the Chantry or the Magisterium. Little is committed to paper in Rivain—what would be the point, they were told, with spirits as their witnesses and the Fade itself as the repository of all knowledge? Yet it is no less real for it, crystalized forever in dreams as though in amber.

“To bed, then?” Fenris asks, and Hawke nods with a tired smile. He helps her to her feet, her movements hindered by the fabrics and jewelry draped all about her, the headdress of filigreed silver now resting lopsided on her brow. It takes them several minutes to free it from her hair and untangle the strings of cowrie shells from the thick coil of necklaces, but finally it comes free, and with it the veil of multicolored thread.

Hawke laughs as she undoes the numerous sashes knotted around her waist. “I feel like a present getting unwrapped.”

He grins. “An idea for Satinalia, perhaps?”

“As long as there’s no regifting.”

“Not to worry.” He smirks as an idea forms into his mind. “Wait.” She raises curious eyes at him, her hand hovering on a bracelet. “Keep the jewelry on. I want to see you.”

A faint flush rises to her cheeks at his words, but her eyes shine through blackened lashes and her mouth slants into a knowing smirk. She came to him unadorned that evening, dressed in a simple robe of blue silk, and as the night deepened her gifts came to fight for space on her person: precious wood, mother-of-pearl and gemstones, most well-loved already, some still warm with the previous owner’s skin. Even the children brought her tie-dyed handkerchiefs and necklaces of seashells strung together with twine. By morning Hawke accumulated a few sovereigns’ worth of embroidered silk and tortoise-shell combs; enough for any young couple to start a life together, given to them without expectation, except that they give in turn.

It is so unlike anything he has known, when the magisters and the Marcher nobles alike hoard their riches more fiercely than dragons; yet this village welcomed them, two strangers and the near-score of orphans who ended up in their care.

And with Hawke— _for_ Hawke—he will gladly call this nameless village home.

Together they do away with the warren of belts, chains and sashes wrapped around her waist. The drape of her garments loosens, revealing the swell of her breasts as Fenris bares one shoulder, then the other. The dress and the shift underneath then pool at her ankles in a heap of turquoise and orange silk—leaving a bolt of fabric undyed might as well be criminal in Rivain, and so she looked nothing like the red brides of the Imperium or those of the south, peering at their grooms from behind chaste veils. Try as he might, he cannot picture Hawke in Andrastian white; this, he thinks, suits her, a wild jumble of colors and fabric, draped over a dress that matches her eyes and little else.

Then she is naked before him, save for the thick strands of jewelry about her neck, arms and ankles. A string of pearls slides down her breast, the nipple tightening into a small, pink bud at the caress. “I look like an upturned jewelry case,” she laughs, but something shy flutters at the edges. It would look ludicrous on any other woman, but the chased armlets of precious metals, the strings of coin round her neck, the faceted gems dangling from her ears—none shines as bright as she.

“You look beautiful,” he amends, circling her waist with his hands to tug her closer. Her jewelry clinks as she staggers forward, and then her body is pressed against his, warmer than even Rivain’s evergreen clime. Her skin is smooth, sunburns long healed to a freckled, golden cast by a spell. Fenris catches her mouth into another kiss, deeper this time, while her hands slide up his chest and shoulders to link together behind the nape of his neck. Desire pools into his stomach, thick and sweet as syrup.

Hawke makes an appreciative sound into his mouth when his body betrays his arousal. “Oh? So it’s ‘untimely death at Varric’s hands’ after all?”

He laughs, his face warming. “Unless you are too full?”

She slides her hand down the front of his trousers. “Hmm, I’ve got space enough to squeeze this in, at least.”

He groans—most of all at the predictably awful quip, but also because she is stroking him now, her palm pressed hard against his stiffening cock. “Let us consummate this marriage, then,” he says against the skin of her neck. He lifts her off the ground without effort, Hawke’s thighs wrapping around his waist while he lumbers blindly towards the bed, their mouths locked together till his toes brush the footboard.

The mattress dips as he lays her down on it. Stretched in a heap of pearls and gold, Hawke curls her hand into his shirt and pulls him down to her, parting her legs around his hips. Her mouth opens under his; her tongue slips between her lips to brush his. He grazes her lip with his teeth, knows to expect the sharp gasp and shudder that run through her as he does. It is a slow, familiar dance, rehearsed hundreds of times over the years: the tide rise of her blood under her skin, the crest of her heartbeat against his, the gentle surrender of her otherwise unshuttable mouth—all of that has grown only dearer as he has come to expect it.

_Better than the first time_ , he might say, if he were inclined to the inanities of Varric’s two-copper romances. He cannot forget that first night with her, years ago, and how scared he was to tear down his walls and let her in; how scared he was that once stripped of his armor she would see him for what he is: more scars than man, bearing the gouges and marks of all those who came before her. But he knows little now except that she does see him as he is, and loves him despite—no— _for_ it.

Strength, she calls it. Would he had understood sooner.

Still, her body is a well-charted map now. His mouth drops to the soft skin beneath her earlobe, and he knows she will tilt her head in invitation. He trails kisses down her throat, and feels the thready rumble of a moan answering him. He knows the spots on her neck that will make her tremble and squeeze her thighs around his hips, and those that will make her twitch and snort in mirth.

But there is comfort in familiarity. There is intimacy where once there was fear, and safety, in knowing her and knowing she knows him just as well. With her, there is no taking without giving, and there is a future, where once he only saw darkness.

Perhaps he should have married her sooner.

Her breaths are coming harder under his mouth already; a string of crystal beads rolls down the heave of her breasts to rest in the dip of her collarbone. Fenris would find her ready for him, he knows. All he has to do is pull his cock free and take her, but he wants to worship her like the queen she looks like now. Instead he lets his hands roam the beloved lines of her body, traces the swells and dips of her breasts and waist, lets his fingers slide down the smooth expanse of her thighs towards the dark, flushed folds of her entrance, teasing, not quite touching. She bites her bottom lip, hands curling into fists around the sheets, a glint of cobalt gazing up at him through thick lashes.

Her back arches towards him when he moves his lips to the rosy point of one breast. It hardens under the swirling motion of his tongue, and a sigh wells up under his mouth before escaping her throat. The soft noise makes his arousal ache against his trousers, but he keeps his hands steady on her skin, moving the thick coil of jewelry to bare her breasts completely.

He sees them, then: small tattoos adorn her breastbone like an amulet; two more curve along the undersides of her breasts, almost concealed in the half-moon shadows cast on her ribcage. If she were standing, they would be invisible. Gently, he lifts her breasts to expose the designs: small geometric patterns, not unlike those that often adorn house walls and hems alike. They match the tattoo that was already beneath her navel—the leaf of a palm tree and its seeds, just above the thatch of black of hair of her sex—though the hand that inked them is different.

Hawke blushes almost all the way down to her new tattoos when Fenris looks up at her. “It’s tradition here. A—wish of sorts,” she explains. Anyone else might not even have heard the slight falter in her words, but he does. “We’re the only ones who know what they are. And—well, Elder Mariame, since she put them there. And the spirit, I guess. _Almost_ just us.”

He brushes his thumb along the ink. Magic lingers in the seals—nothing he could feel were it not for his own markings, but it is there, diffuse as the dawn rising beyond the ocean, gentle as the warmth of a stone left in the sun. “What spirit was it?”

“Hope.” She smiles, but it wavers under the glimmer of her eyes, fragile and brittle. “Although I’m told Love is the more popular choice for marriages,” she adds with a strangled laugh.

Hope, of course. He closes his eyes against the prickling burn, an ache swelling in his chest, and bends his mouth to hers into another kiss. It is a light, tender thing, so gentle he cannot tell who lets their lips part first. “Tell me about them,” he says against her mouth.

The sea, she explains, mirror swirls on both breasts: waves crested with sea spray, for its bounties and a life that wants for nothing;

on her breastbone, the sun, dotted lines fanning out from the center of a small diamond, for light and warmth;

and underneath, an anchor like a curved arrowhead, for home.

“They are beautiful,” he says, and means it, the lines crisp against her southern complexion, like tree branches before a winter sky. He trails his fingers down the palm tree leaf tattooed beneath her navel, and the faintest pulse of magic stirs against the pads of his fingers in answer. “Did you choose them?”

She nods. “It turns out a mabari wasn’t an option, so I had to settle on these.”

“Did it hurt?” he asks, quirking a corner of his mouth. Never one for pain, Hawke.

“Oh, you have no bloody idea,” she replies, breaking into a grin. “Bet they heard me all the way down the shoreline at low tide last night, and then in case there was anyone left who didn’t, I had to get all the hair ripped off my body afterwards.”

Fenris laughs. “Not all of it,” he points out, sliding his fingers down the coarse, dark hair at the apex of her thighs.

She tenses under his touch, the breath catching in her throat. “When in Rivain and all that, but I draw the line at getting sugar paste smeared on my bits.”

“Your—bits,” he repeats, chuckling at the choice of words. Her toes curl on the mattress when he dips a fingertip inside her; it comes out glistening, and he licks it clean, enjoying both her taste and the sharp breath she sucks in at that. “I shall enjoy them all the same.”

She hooks her fingers into the sash around his waist and tugs him closer, sending his pulse running high. “Well, now that you’ve seen mine, will you show me yours?”

“As you desire.” He sweeps off the embroidered, fringed sash draped over his shoulder, then pulls off his tunic, the beaded collar clinking against the floorboards as he drops it by the bed. Hawke watches him, propped on her elbows, and where he once abhorred eyes on him, that feeling of being touched without being touched, he welcomes it now, glories in the slow glide of her gaze on his body, the satisfied curl at the edges of her mouth when his erection juts free. He hisses as she brushes a toe down the length, the light touch magnified by the strain of his arousal.

He bends his mouth to her body, feeling like a starved man before a feast, the desert wanderer at the oasis, then presses a trail of kisses to her tattoos. The ink glimmers in the morning light, a faint gleam like the inside of an oyster shell. The skin of her belly ripples under his mouth as he kisses his way lower and lower, past the dip of her navel and towards the part of her thighs—

“Wait,” Hawke says, sounding like it cost her a great effort. She pulls him back to herself and kisses him, then guides him down on the bed. “Lie back.”

He cocks an eyebrow but obeys, stretching down on the warm imprint of her body on the sheets. “Ah,” he says when she positions herself on all fours above him, facing the foot of the bed. Her sex hangs above him like a fleshy, dewy flower from a vine. “Nice view.”

She turns to wink at him from above her shoulder. “Well, marriage is all about reciprocity, isn’t it?”

The strings of beads and coins around her neck clink together as they come to rest on his stomach, while silken strands of hair caress the inside of his thighs. She lowers her mouth to his cock, her breath warm on the head, her hand tight around the base. His blood is pounding under his skin. Heat coils low in his stomach where the tips of her breasts brush past, kindled by the heady scent of her. He grips her hips and pulls her down to his mouth, and a low growl escapes his throat at the first brush of her tongue.

It is messy. There is no finesse to their movements, not when pleasure is gathering inside them both like storm clouds in the mid-Solis sky. An apt comparison, he thinks, grinning against her heat: she is about as wet as a summer storm, slick drops of arousal seeping out of her as he lavishes light, feathery touches of his tongue upon her. Small strained noises hum against his erection as her tongue draws slow swirls along its hard length. It throbs in anticipation of her mouth, the tight ring of her lips around it, and if his own mouth was not otherwise occupied, Fenris might just beg her not to keep him waiting.

At last her lips slide down onto him. Wet heat engulfs his cock whole, and he has to will his hips to remain in place, even as they yearn to thrust deeper into her mouth. He wants to savor her and the slow back and forth of his cock inside her mouth, so instead he forces his attention back to her, closing his lips around the swollen bud of flesh to gently suck on it. His entire cock thrums with the moan that escapes her throat; pleasure blooms inside him, petals of heat unfurling along his limbs to his scalp and the very tips of his fingers and toes, and he works his tongue harder against her, matching the rising pace of her mouth.

Hawke is close. Muffled cries spill down his cock, her lips and hand wrapped tightly around it. Her sex gives a pulse of pleasure, and he clasps her hips to draw her down onto his mouth, pressing his tongue harder against her as he laps up the sweet taste trickling out of her and—

_Venhedis._

Fenris comes. So focused was he on her pleasure, so intent was he on taking the intensity of her moans ever upwards, that he missed how near he was to his own climax till too late. He spends himself inside her mouth, the heat of it dissolving him to pieces so that for a moment he only sees the dawn, breaking behind his closed eyelids.

He returns to himself, his fingers digging deep into her skin and an open-mouthed cry tailing out of him. Hawke strokes him through the aftershocks, breathless laughter skimming past his cock. She is proud of herself, he knows, for undoing him so suddenly: it was a long time before he could bring himself to let his seed spill into her mouth despite her encouragements, and he’s never done so without at least some sort of warning.

No better apology than picking up where he left off, however, so he curls his tongue back against the ripe bud of flesh atop her entrance and resumes his ministrations.

Hawke does not last long. The pearls and gems rattle around her neck as she quakes above him, his name filling the room then shattering into a near sob. Fenris keeps flicking his tongue till she crumbles into a shuddering, panting heap next to him. Her head lolls against his shin as she settles on her back, legs folded at the knees; only then does he let his head fall back against the pillow, and they stay like this till their breaths have evened out again.

“I’m sorry,” he pants, sliding an arm under her thighs to rest his hand on her hip. “I did not feel it coming.”

He feels her smile against the skin of his leg. “Oh, I beg to differ. You most _definitely_ felt that, if those sounds you made are any indication.”

Fenris wants to kiss her, but he cannot muster the strength to push himself off the bed just yet. Instead he lets his fingers run up and down the slight, silky swell of her hip, the jutting bone there like a smooth round pebble under satin sheets. “You are one to talk,” he retorts, tilting his head to plant a kiss between two beaded anklets. “If they did not hear you last night they certainly did now. Scared all the fish, I wager.”

“Jerk. Although I suppose there’s something to be said for _actual_ windows, with glass panes and all.”

“So you can complain about the heat instead? I’ll pass.”

“ _Jerk_.”

He laughs at her feigned indignation, then looks over her narrow feet to the window. Not much of a separation between inside and outside, here: the houses are more windows than walls, often dressed with naught more than thin, latticed insect screens or beaded curtains, swaying in what little breeze the heat grants them. A flight of seagulls wheels over the burgeoning morning sky; swaths of rose gild the underside of flowy white clouds, and the glossy, feather-shaped leaves of the palm tree before their house sway in the ocean breeze.

It is nothing like Minrathous, or even Hightown, where estates are guarded by walls twice the height of a man, spiked wrought-iron fences and hired muscle. But here, all that stands between one house and the next is a trust in good faith that Fenris would have once called naive.

How he would have loathed such a place before; too open, too vulnerable. But now, with Hawke’s warm, fragrant body dovetailed into his and her taste lingering on his lips? Now he could stand to build a life of his own here.

“Uh oh,” Hawke says. Fenris blinks himself out of his thoughts to find her smiling at him. “You have that thinky look about you.”

He lets his gaze wander back to the window. “I was thinking I like it here, after all.”

She pillows her head on his leg to look at him. “Even with the Seers and their magic?”

“Better than Kirkwall and its endless throngs of blood mages.”

Hawke laughs. “Setting the bar low here.”

It does not _please_ him, these women communing with spirits and venerated for it, but at least he is here to keep an eye on them, and what matters is that the Chantry’s grasp is not so wide that it can reach this jeweled shard of the Rivaini coast. “You are safe here. Nothing else matters. And it would be a better place than Kirkwall to—”

He catches himself in time, but Hawke’s eyes on him are intent. “To…?”

Fenris sighs. “To have children of our own, if we wanted.”

Foolish, he admonishes himself. Selfish, even, with fifteen orphans under their clumsy, fumbling wings already; but even these orphans— _their_ orphans now, _their_ children—have been birthed by misfortune and delivered by death. Once he never would have wanted to bring a child into a world so broken as this one, but he can think of no sweeter defiance in the face of everything they have lost than making something of their own.

The salt-scented exhales of the Amaranthine billow towards them as the room sinks back into silence. Hawke’s eyes are closed now, long lashes fluttering on her cheeks. He needs not ask to know her thoughts.

When she speaks, her voice is small and soft. “I would love that,” she says, something wistful trembling at the corners of her mouth. “I like it here, too. We can just be _us_. I’m not the scion of the Amells or the Champion of Kirkwall here, I’m just …” Her voice catches in her throat, and she looks at him then, her eyes liquid and wide. “I’m just your wife.”

And then she smiles, a smile so bright he finds himself blinking back tears, as though sun-dazed.

Fenris closes his eyes. He thinks of the boy he once was, for whom there was no future except that which lay before his very eyes; not even a frantic fantasy to get him through the next hour, some hopeless dream of a wife or family in a small house on stilts by the Amaranthine, with everything he holds dear in the shelter of its small roof.

To give a child the home and freedom he never had—would that not restore some balance in the world, heal even the minutest cracks in its crust?

And would that not be worth it?

As if she guessed his thoughts—and she probably has—Hawke threads their fingers together. “But _first_ ,” she starts, and the smile turns mischievous on her lips, “first we just enjoy ourselves as newlyweds for a good while. I’m enjoying this married life far too much to stop taking witherstalk just yet.”

“Of course,” he chuckles, stroking her knuckles with his thumb. “I would never suggest something of such import as making babies without practice first.”

Hawke, laughing, heaves herself off the bed and straddles him. “Speaking of practice, shall we pick up where we left off?”

His cock has just barely gone soft, and yet the words are enough to stir the guttering embers of desire back to life in his stomach. Her thighs gleam with her slick and his saliva; her nipples, pink and tight, could be just two more rose-quartz beads hanging off her neck. With the great flames of urgency now quenched, they are free to let their hands roam each other’s bodies. He watches her watching him, her eyes following the slow wandering course of her hands on his chest and stomach. Her palms are warm, her fingertips light as they rove along the tendrils of lyrium, and her mouth is soft and pliant when he pulls her to himself, her lips parting to make way for his tongue.

Slowly, slowly, he coaxes the heat back in her blood with hands and mouth, till her breaths turn to rasps and her kisses to flame. She straightens up again, and her eyes when she looks at him are dark with desire. Her jewelry rises and falls with her breaths, nacre and gold flinging wavering specks of light on the pale column of her neck. A flush blooms pink on her cheeks as his thumbs brush the folds of her sex, his hands splayed high on her thighs. When his fingers slide ever upwards, she lifts herself off him, strands of arousal glistening between their bodies. His cock stirs back to life at the sight, throbbing once at the gasp that escapes her mouth when he curls one finger into her. Another finger draws a throaty moan out of her; she arches her back, exposing the tattoos on the undersides of her breasts. Then she starts rocking her hips to stroke herself on his hand, her sex tight as it moves around his fingers.

She sways above him like a mirage, the strings of beads swinging against her breasts with the movement. Fenris presses his hand harder against her, matching his rhythm to hers. Color rides high on her cheeks before long; she catches her bottom lip in her teeth, biting back a moan. He reaches to cup one of her breasts, delighting in the way her voice catches in her throat as he gives the soft mound a gentle squeeze. There are few things he enjoys more than watching the slow rising crest of her pleasure, the way all things show stark on her face. No wonder she always chafed in Hightown, where people wear their own faces like masks: Hawke has always been like the sky instead, wide open, casting her light and her shadows on everything around her.

What he sees right now is how little it would take to tip her over the edge again. His fingers slide three knuckles deep inside her, and she cries out, her sex pulsing around them. He wants nothing more than to be inside her, his cock already stiff again between their bodies, but he wants to see pleasure breaking on her face first. “Come for me, Hawke,” he commands, pressing his palm harder against her.

She does. For half a heartbeat she hovers still as stone above him, her sex clenched hard around his fingers; then she shudders with a strength that startles him, spine arching back like a bow drawn taut, and a strangled shout shatters the warm space between them.

Fenris cannot bear it any longer. Hawke is still writhing with the aftershocks of her peak when he tosses her back onto the mattress, and she falls crosswise to the bed in a clinking heap of coins and cowries shells, a string of pearls caught between her parted lips. He pulls the pearls free from her mouth with one hand and sucks her slickness off the fingers of the other, then kneels between her open legs. She is still trembling under him, hairpins and gold-toothed combs scattered in the black, silken halo of her hair around her reddened face, and it is all he can do not to enter her right there and then.

He grips her thighs, his cock hard and dark against the creamy white skin of her belly and legs. “Shall we consummate this marriage at last?” he asks, his voice gritty with want.

“Oh, Maker, _yes_ ,” she pants, squirming against him so that the underside of his cock brushes against her entrance. He could nearly climax from the sight alone, the sheer shamelessness of it stoking the fire in his belly into a blaze. “Fen, _please_.”

The sensation of her sex, warm and wet against him, would drive stronger men to madness, but he wills himself to endure. “You were not this enthusiastic during your vows,” he teases.

Hawke narrows her eyes at him, and Fenris has to bite the inside of his cheek not to laugh. “Fenris, I’m the happiest woman to have walked this Maker-forsaken earth, but right now, I just want you to fuck me so hard the _Amells_ feel it.”

He lifts an eyebrow and breaks into a grin, one of those idiotic, open-mouthed smiles that come to him more often with every day spent at her side. “I love you,” he says, the words falling out of his mouth with more ease than he would ever have thought possible once.

He does not wait for her answer: he enters her at that, her entrance so slick his cock slips into her in one swift motion. Hawke cries out, her body arching under him. Her heat is so fierce, the sheath of her sex so tight Fenris has to wait for the wave of pleasure swelling inside him to founder again, like some callow youth on his first encounter. His pulse thunders under her gaze while she watches him, pupils blown wide with want, but it is a few long seconds before he dares move again.

At last he allows himself to start moving inside her. He rocks his hips against her, slow at first, then faster, drawing high-pitched, close-lipped out of her with each thrust of his cock. Her hands grope for purchase, slide down the film of sweat on his shoulder blades—Fenris notices, distantly, how warm the room has gotten between the heat of their exertion and the steady rise of the sun in the eastern sky, and lowers himself to kiss her, her legs folding under him so that her knees hook on his shoulders. Her lips make way for his tongue, and he drinks her voice like wine as it spills free between their mouths with each thrust of his cock.

He yanks the coil of necklaces off her breasts to better touch her. “ _Kaffas_ ,” he mutters when a string snaps. He lifts his eyes to see a handful of bright beads clattering to the floor, but Hawke draws his mouth back down to hers and they are forgotten.

He could lose himself in her embrace. His own breathless moans seep out the tight seal of their mouths; heat coalesces between them, near enough to melt the bounds of their bodies. He could let it burn him up and dissolve into the grip of her hands on his shoulders, the warmth of her damp skin against his, the hard clench of her sex around his, but he wants the moment to last, his scalp aching from the tight clasp of her fingers in his hair and her mouth dovetailed to his—

Their lips part. Hawke breaks into laughter as her head drops off the mattress, the force of his thrusts having pushed them closer to the edge. Fenris straightens up to lift her hips off the bed and tugs her back towards the center of the mattress, and she cries out loud when he bores into her again. “Like this,” she pants, hands twisting into the sheets, and Fenris keeps her hips off the mattress and the angle of his cock inside her, looking down their bodies to watch it move back and forth between the swollen, flushed folds of her sex.

The rhythmic slap of his hips against the inside of her thighs punctuates her cries. He thought her worn out, but her sex pulses around him, clenched hard with mounting pleasure. The sight of her, eyes glimmering and two rosy spots high on her cheeks, her breasts heaving in pace with the movement of his cock inside the liquid heat of her—it is nigh unbearable. He would have long spent himself inside her if he did not know her so close to her own peak, so he pries one hand off her thigh and reaches for the pink, glistening pearl atop her entrance.

She lasts but seconds. When she comes again, her entire body is lifted as though by an ocean swell, then washed ashore as she settles down on their bed again; and the cresting wave breaks upon him too, pleasure roaring inside him as it floods even the smaller interstices of his being, till he cannot even tell where he ends and Hawke begins, the both of them two loops of the same knot.

Fenris emerges again a minute, an aeon later, his body sunk against hers like a shipwreck on the ocean floor. Their hearts hammer against each other, as if to touch. He kisses the dark lustrous sheet of her hair, ignoring the strands sticking to his lips as they inch their way to her earlobe, then her temple.

He tastes saltwater, and frowns when he notices the glimmer on her cheekbones for the first time. “Hawke? Is all well?”

Her fingers tremble down the channel of his spine; she inhales one sharp breath, but nods her head and swallows, hard. “More than well,” she answers, the smile on her face watery and bright, like shards of sunlight scattered on the surface of the sea. “Flames, I think I just saw the Maker’s face,” she adds, choking out a wet laugh.

He brushes the tears off her face with his knuckles. “Oh? And is He everything the Chantry would have us believe?”

More tears roll out the corners of her eyes, but her smile does not falter. “Andraste can keep her husband,” she answers, sliding a fingertip down the taper of his ear. “Mine’s better.”

Something aches inside him, close to bursting. “I love you,” he says again, kissing her tears away, for this one thing, at least, is not diminished for lack of rarity. Now he understands why she keeps lavishing the words upon him, if only for the sheer joy of tasting them, just as one never tires of that first clean bite in a ripe peach.

“And I love you,” Hawke answers, her smile like a salve on a wound.

They stay like this till their heartbeats slow down again. Fenris gently pulls himself out of her, then picks the clattered beads off the floor and examines the broken clasp while Hawke freshens up. An easy fix, he concludes, and tucks them away in a drawer to be repaired once he’s had some sleep.

Hawke returns, anklets rattling with her steps. It takes them several minutes to disentangle her hair from all the chains and strings around her neck. “Putting our marriage to the test already, I see,” she says, blowing out a sigh while Fenris laughs, but together they remove one by one all the jewelry around her neck and waist and wrists and ankles, then pluck the combs and hairpins from her hair.

She smooths down the last string of pearls in her jewelry box, then sits at the small vanity. “Is it right for me to accept all this?” she asks in a small voice, brushing the stippled surface of a cowry with one fingertip. “It’s just … so much.”

“Never return a gift in Rivain,” he reminds her, not unkindly.

“I know, I know. Not unless one wishes to make mortal enemies of the gifter and their entire line,” she quips in reply.

Fenris laughs under his breath, and lets his hands rest on her freckled shoulders. “We will make it up to them. The children will need clothes and foci, and Ruy’s boat is still taking on water.”

She nods, then starts fiddling with her hairbrush. “I think—I’d forgotten how kind people can be. Kirkwall will do that, I suppose,” she adds, and he catches a glimpse of the wistful smile playing on the lips of her reflection in the mirror. For a moment he thinks of the young refugee he met ten years ago, who could barely afford the bread she insisted on sharing with him and always kept the charred bits for herself. “Do you miss it?”

He blinks, catching her eyes in the mirror. “Kirkwall? No.”

No surprise on her face, despite the finality of his answer. “Me neither. I miss Varric, of course, and Merrill and Aveline, but … not Kirkwall.”

He feels an odd sort of relief at that. Even Kirkwall could not warp her as it has so many others, twist her heart to the bends and turns of its streets, and yet Fenris would not have her walk those flagstones again, knowing that beneath her feet the city hungers, waiting for her to take a false step. For every boon Kirkwall grants, it takes twice as much.

No, if anyone belongs here, it’s her. Tomorrow she will again help the village elders teach the younger mages their first spells, and he will contribute his labor wherever it is most needed.

In time they will earn their place.

Fenris watches for a moment as Hawke removes the kohl from her eyes and the carmine from her lips, then makes his way to the window. Outside, two birds squabble over some shellfish in the surf, seafoam bubbling up towards them. Longboats bob up and down by the quays, fishnets and spears left glinting at the bottom while even the fisherfolk are sleeping off their long night of revelry.

The rustle of Hawke’s boar-bristle brush through her hair layers itself over that of the rolling waves—the sound of home if there ever was one, soothing and soft as breathing, constant as a heartbeat.

He is still leaning against the warming sill when Hawke’s arms slide around his waist and her soft head comes to rest in the space between his shoulders. A wedge of sunlight creeps up the floor of the room, still heavy with the heat of their bodies and thick with the briny scent of sex and saltwater. They stay there for the span of a breath or a hundred, till Fenris lifts one of her hands to his mouth and presses a kiss to her knuckles, then pulls her into the morning light.

Her hair spills down her back in a black river, bright crescents of sunlight limning the curves of one bare shoulder and breast. This, he knows, is how he will remember her, decades from now: barefaced, her skin pale and her features soft, almost vanishing into the bright blue light of her eyes.

She grins, but something bashful hovers at the corners of her mouth. “I hope you hadn’t forgotten you were marrying a glorified Fereldan farmgirl.”

Fenris laughs, but when he tries to speak, his voice catches in his throat. “You are—” he manages, then has to blink away the haze from his eyes. _Beautiful_ , he wants to say. _Too_ beautiful—the Maker cannot possibly have meant to give him so bright and brave a woman, and it is only a matter of time before He realizes His mistake and takes her from him again.

Except—

Except He _has_ , and still Hawke came back to him, came back _for_ him, and perhaps they have earned this peace at last, this quiet, undisturbed except for the laughter of children playing by the shore and the occasional neighborly squabble.

Hawke does not say anything. Instead she cups his face in her hands, fingers curled around his ears, and Fenris has but to tilt his head to press his lips to the pulse fluttering in her wrist. To think that once—once love was a reward his master kept clenched in his fist; once he did anything to earn himself the favor Danarius dispensed all too miserly, a quarter of ripe mandarin or a night spent on a straw mat instead of the marble floor. Now Fenris shares his bed with the strongest woman he knows, and his chest clenches at the memory of the boy he once was, who never even knew he could have more than cold, hard stone for a bed and his own arm for a pillow.

He draws the curtains closed, then unties the mosquito net and lets it spill around the bed like a silent, shimmering waterfall. Hawke flops down onto the mattress, muttering about the wet spot on the bed, but is asleep by the time her head settles into the crook of his shoulder. Fenris fights the call of the Fade a few moments longer: they left Ferelden with barely enough to fill a sea chest, made it to Rivain with less, but now everything he holds dear is in his arms, and no dream could come close to the gentle, fragrant weight of the woman he found (or did she him?), like something one secretly hopes for but does not expect: wondrous, impossible, like a song out of a seashell.

He closes his eyes, and all is quiet but for the slow rhythm of his wife’s breaths and the hushed roar of the sea.

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  I think this as good a time as any to share this lovely, lovely commission I got from the incredibly talented [Lowenael](http://needapotion.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> We don’t know much about Rivain, so one of the best parts of writing this story has been exploring the world and its customs. It was important to me to include a couple of nods to my own Moroccan heritage, namely with the tattoos and headdress (look them up, they’re stunning!).
> 
> As always, I would love to hear your thoughts, and feel free to say hello on [Tumblr](https://aban-asaara.tumblr.com/)! ♥


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